A style sheet language may be used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. One such style sheet language may be cascading style sheets (CSS). CSS may be used to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. CSS may enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language like XML) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation may improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentational characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content.
Current client-server applications may use a browser front end to display client functionality to a user. Some of these client-server applications may be designed to provide a user interface that conforms its screen element schema to a schema of an operating system of the client. One method of doing this may be to hardcode a style sheet for execution at the client that causes the client application display to mimic that of an operating system schema. While this may be adequate for operating systems that only have a few non-alterable schema sets, this may not be prudent for operating systems that provide a customizable schema set (such as, for example, Windows XP® that allows a user to modify individual elements of a schema set) or that have many schema sets.
Because existing style languages may be designed to be generic functional languages, client specific functionality may be limited. Moreover, existing style sheet languages may not provide function extensions, and thus, existing browsers that are compliant with a standard style sheet language may not be able to process additional functions. In order to extend a style sheet language for the purpose of providing schema matching, for example, an arduous process of petitioning a standards board may be required. While style sheets can be individually hard coded, additional functionality may be needed to enable efficient schema matching.